quickening

freewrites at sixteen weeks pregnant

I have felt some early quickening, at least I’m fairly certain I have. A warm water float atop my worry for this baby and my life and the world. I feel a lot of surrender, some positive and powerful, some nearing defeat. Both belong. I sense that this birth will act as a hinge in my life, as all births do. You live a before and an after. It feels significant, and yet inscrutable, because I’m caught in the motion right now. I don’t have the perspective or ability to look back that I’ll have in a year or two. Whatever is shifting is still in-process — I am along for the ride.

But even being able to articulate that is a balm. I used to feel so able to define myself and my life, to place myself squarely in all sorts of categories. I don’t fit so well anymore, and I think that’s a good thing. At least, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The older I get, the longer I mother my children, the more children I grow in my body, the less I feel concerned with any of the things we do to try to fit into the categories. I have never fit well, and I doubt I ever will. I’m less willing to play the games now, I guess. It helps to feel so much belonging within the small universe of the home and family. My children know me, my husband knows me, my parents and sister know me. They don’t need me to be anything other than absolutely myself, and in their embrace I am allowed to change. It’s such a basic thing, but it took me a very long time and a lot of unknotting and unknowing to learn.

Anyway, my energy is coming back, and I can eat way more easily now than even two weeks ago. Such a relief. The first trimester was truly so hard, I was white knuckling my way through. It is so weird how all that un-easiness just vanishes. I already forget exactly how it felt. It was terrible though! This is how we do this again and again! We truly just forget! There were definitely moments in the first trimester when I was vowing I would never do this again, and now I am daring myself that I probably could, even deeper into my thirties! Ha, the bravado of pregnancy and birth! We’ll see how I feel in the throes of active labor. I’ll be cursing that bravado. I’ll be bearing my teeth at the version of myself that feels brave now, in the second trimester’s glow. And that’s birth, isn’t it. We contain all our parts, and use all of them to get our baby out, impossibly, terribly, powerfully. Yeah, I need to get pissed, get angry, and frustrate my baby out.

Oh I just hope they’re ok, that they’re whole and healthy and well. I don’t know yet. We decided against genetic testing again, so we don’t know much about our baby’s health until the 20-week anatomy scan coming up in a few weeks. I remind myself that the very bad things are so rare. Incredibly. Still, it’s hard to not know. The womb is a black box, and that’s my kid in there. We have made it safely this far. I learned in my first pregnancy that my mom lost a baby at 16 weeks, so it’s a tender milestone. Any loss is so hard, but the idea of a second or third trimester loss is unimaginably scary. So I don’t imagine it, I just watch and wait like every other pregnant person has forever. It was encouraging how clear and strong my baby’s heartbeat was the second the midwife laid the doppler on my belly, somehow right in the perfect place. A beating heart, that’s so much right now. My two big boys and their beating hearts. Who will join us now?

I feel sensitive and emotional, crying easily. I keep wanting to listen to Sufjan Stevens, exclusively. He’s never been pregnant, but he gets it! So much still to endure. Twenty-four more weeks! Ah, yikes. I did some gentle movement this morning and that felt good. I watched the trees. I still feel so tired, but less useless. I don’t want to force my way through this pregnancy. I want to stay soft and let the time flow forward as slowly as is right. A lot of things feel boring to me right now?! Things I used to enjoy! What is going on?! Almost unbearable sometimes to be inside my mind, and also awfully quiet. Pregnancy is so weird, so life-altering. It’s all these brain changes that I most want to talk about with others, but they’re so hard to track and articulate. Is it just me?

I love being a doula, and I love going over to my clients’ houses to chat with them about their pregnancy and birth. I love when they text me their thoughts and questions. I want to talk and talk right now, I want to be social and present and pass time sitting in living rooms and at dining tables with women talking. And I want to sit through the night at a birth, pressing my client’s sacrum with my palms, breathing labor’s rare air with them. The radical presence it requires of me snaps me right out of whatever preoccupation I’d been caught in before. It’s sort of a weird comparison, but theater was one of the first great loves of my life, and doula work feels the most like being on stage I’ve felt in a long time — not in the performance sense, but in the sense that you have to be all there, and ready to move and act and play your role. I feel activated is what I mean, and I think that’s what theater made me feel too, why I loved it. I want to be out there, and I want to be at home with my children, making muffins and doing the dishes and building duplo zoos, and I love that this job gives me so much of both. I feel unbearably lucky sometimes. I feel worried about taking maternity leave from my doula practice (will all the work dry up?) — but no use worrying about that now. It’s happening, and it will most likely be ok.

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Counter-argument to the “belonging” feeling I wrote about before. I feel very financially vulnerable right now so I haven’t been buying anything unnecessary, but I wish I could wear a whole new wardrobe of beautiful clothes. I wish I could become beautiful, enviable, mysterious. I wish I knew how to put my makeup on and make my hair look good. I get more frumpy every day, it feels like, and I’m mostly ok with it but sometimes I’m not. I used to be very cute, in my first pregnancy and just after. I was twenty-five pounds lighter then (honestly an unhealthy weight, looking back at pictures), and I had way more time and money for messing around with my personal style. I took so many pictures of myself then, and was somewhat of a sewing influencer at the time. I struggle putting my own image on the internet now, still doing it sometimes as a sort of practice in letting go — but it feels so different. Still, there’s a beauty in my strong and capable body that is supporting its third pregnancy. I am healthy and able to do this. I almost blend in in the suburb where I live, but I will always be a little weird in my homesewn linen pants and my secondhand babaa sweaters that I will wear until they’re threadbare when I’m eighty, I hope. I long to be myself, I guess. I long to feel beautiful that way. Pregnancy brings it into sharp relief — my body is getting so weird, not quite detectably pregnant yet but bigger than before. I have to just allow myself to change and keep changing, age and keep aging. How can I wrap myself in love? It’s not a matter of a sweater, but a posture, and attitude. I want to feel good. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The beautiful people on the internet do get to me sometimes. I don’t look like them! And I don’t want to — but wouldn’t it be easier if I did? Yes, and no. Mostly no.

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I’m back to gentle movement after a very stagnating first trimester. My teacher, Kara, urges me on through the screen. It’s funny how we can have teachers now who we’ve never met, the age of the internet continues to fascinate me. There is still intimacy there, as there always has been, it’s just more one-sided than ever. It feels so good to move, and I dare myself to continue as pregnancy gets more and more extreme. Will I be able to? I’m older now than I was before, it will all be harder. I know this. Still, I dare myself. I will stay mobile. I will remain devoted to myself. I will spend the time, expend the energy. I feel the difference when I do. It is so easy not to, to make so many excuses. Pregnancy is the perfect excuse not to do things you don’t want to do, so I draw the want up from somewhere deep and primal. I will not sit on my phone watching short videos. I will move and stretch and lift instead. This morning, the movement was short and gentle, an introduction to qijong, which Kara has been training in. The movement of energy through the body, the energetic body being given shapes to move through. It felt so delicious, to whoosh and gather and tap and shake and swipe and glide. Not exercise, movement. I need my energy to be given safe passage through my body right now. Like airing out a house, opening the windows, letting the wind pass through. It felt like that. In pregnancy, more than ever, I need that. In these times, more than ever, I need that.

I had a day at home with my boys yesterday and felt my irritability hanging over me like a veil all day. Why is it so hard to stay calm and pleasant with your own kids? The demands all felt grating, their inability to play without ending up hurting each other, the whining, shouting, crying. It’s all so normal but I felt so overwhelmed by it. The kind of day that makes you think — why would I add another child to this mess? Parenting is so humbling, I felt humble and humiliated alone in my house with my kids. I tried to give them extra hugs and kisses to make up for it. I snuck them extra sour gummies at the end of the day. “I love you still,” I tried to say. “I’m not perfect but I love you so much.”

Still so sacred to feel my baby inside me, that subtle barely-there early quickening. “Hello baby,” I say tentatively, my hand on my belly, even though I know their hearing has not quite developed yet. A relationship begins. I think of this feeling, this soft confidence in my baby, so dissonant with the news I’m digesting. Evil men are destroying the world, starting wars for nothing, killing children who grew in their mothers like mine is. Everyone was a child who grew in their mother, who experienced that warm and real first place that we can’t quite remember. We are all so sacred. Nothing has made me hate war more than growing and bearing children. I am disgusted by the news I hear, by the uselessness of the violence, by the explosions that ruin our air and soil and water, by the death, and the money being made somewhere sinister and secret. It makes me sick. I can’t believe my ears, is what I’m saying. I can’t believe how terrible things are, and have been for so many generations. In all my bad parts, every evil thought I’ve ever had, I could never invent or desire this or anything like it. All the mothers grieve, truly. I breathe it out, try not to keep that horrible energy in my body, because what good will it do me now? My five year old is scared of vampires these days, and I am too — these energy vampires who are stealing our lives, our energy, with their choices. I won’t give it to them. I try not to anyway, rarely succeeding. Are you ok? I’m trying to be, in spite of everything. I don’t want my cortisol to rise so much, my baby feels it!

Pregnancy is such a temporal experience. Forty weeks are not that many, really. This time in my life is rare and fleeting, as hard as it is. I’m sorry that I can’t write about anything else, but how could I? Pregnancy is meant to be absorbing, not an afterthought. I remind myself to linger here, to spend this short time wisely precisely because I know it will pass. I don’t want to be obsessive, but I do want to learn what I can while I’m here, experience what is ripe here. There are certain things you can only feel, only learn, while you’re pregnant. You don’t have to tap into that, but it’s there for the taking. So I am lingering here, a little sheepishly, with my pile of books and my sorrow and my joy. What will I learn here? How will it change me? What do I need to know?

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two photos my children took of me recently — portraits feel different than self-portraits, you know?

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